Cobalt.

We just got back from our trip to the west coast of the South Island a few days ago. It was completely amazing, as things usually are here, but it's nice to be back home after living out of a backpack for ten days.

I finally got to see the temperate rainforests that were a big reason I wanted to come to New Zealand in the first place, and I have to say, they are weird. Weird in a good way, but so strange. In the pacific northwest, the temperate rainforests are made up mostly of conifers. Things like Sitka spruces and westen hemlocks and douglas firs. But in NZ, they don't have real conifers like that. What they do have are podocarps, these crazy ancient kinds of tree that have evolved all kinds of ways to avoid being eaten by moa. Not that they run into that problem often anymore. They also have palm trees. In a temperate rainforest. They are nikau palms, the furthest south any palm tree grow, and they make the forests look tropical. You can look at a forest on the Olympic peninsula of Washington and see immediately that it is probably a bit cold there. But if you looked at a forest in Paparoa New Zealand, you would think it was tropical. They are so sneaky. And even when you get out of the range of the palm trees further south, there are still fern trees that most people think are palms anyway.

As we headed back in an easterly direction, we stopped and spent a few days at Cass Field Station and did research projects for our Terrestrial Ecology class. My group and I studied the epiphyte communities in an older beech forest and a younger beech forest and looked at the differences. For the record, epiphytes are plants that grow entirely on other plants, and in a beech forest, those are probably mosses, lichens, and ferns. There may be nothing harder to do in all of ecology than identify species of moss and lichen. But we had fun and most of the time we had great weather. Even the sandflies weren't that bad, and at the end of the day we got to trudge back to find the amazingness of Emma's cooking. Not a bad place for field work, I'd say.

Another thing we got to see was on the way home. You know that scene in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at the end, when there is that epic battle between the White Witch and all of her minions, and Peter and Aslan and their whole army? And there are all those oddly shaped boulders surrounding a grassy field? Well, I've been there. It's a place called Castle Hill, and it's smack in the middle of the South Island. We turned off onto a random little gravel road and then walked for about fifteen minutes, and suddenly, we were in Narnia. I've climbed over all of those rocks, pretended to be a Narnian archer on some of them, and helped to film our own version of the epic charge. It was on our last day, as we were driving home, and it was a great way to end that trip. I've always wanted to go to Narnia.

Even though we're in New Zealand, we are a bunch of Americans, and we wanted a Thanksgiving. So Thursday afternoon, Emma and Sam whipped up a feast that was at least mostly like a Thanksgiving day meal. Most of the necessary parts were there, except we had chicken instead of turkey (no one really eats turkey in New Zealand, I'm not really sure why), but it felt really odd. And we had to go to class afterward, instead of going on a walk, or shooting things in the backyard, or playing a ton of games. It was good, but it didn't feel that much like an actual Thanksgiving day. Ah well. I guess I really don't know where I'll be next year for Thanksgiving either.

Last night we turned in our papers and gave our presentations for Terrestrial Ecology, so we are officially finished with our classes now. We still have to write one final, comprehensive paper, but that's it. And then we're done. Then we go home. I don't think I'm prepared for this. Where on earth have the last three months gone? I'm excited to see everyone back home, but I think it's going to be something of a shock to my system. For example, to publish this post, I biked for fifteen minutes into town to use the internet at a cafe, and I haven't turned on my cell phone for three months. Another example: Kaitlyn H.'s parents came to visit New Zealand, and as we were meeting them and talking to them for the first time, they mentioned something about an ostrich statue outside their hotel. Ostrich? No way. Moa. We hear about moa all the time. Everywhere you look there is a monument to them, a fossil of one, a plant that is specifically designed to withstand their attack. They have shaped this country in many and powerful ways, and none of us could ever mistake one for anything else. But Kaitlyn's parents didn't have any idea what one was. Weird.

Another thing: I'm going to have to go back to living away from both mountains and the ocean. New Zealand is not a wide country, and most of its people live on the coasts. So all of the places I've been here, have had both mountains, and bordered a large body of water. Kaikoura, Christchurch, Dunedin, Invercargill, Wellington, Paparoa, Bruce Bay, Oban, Mason Bay, Nelson, Picton - they're all on the coast. And even though Queenstown is in the interior, it's next to such a huge lake that it has beaches anyway. When we stayed at Cass for four days this week, it was the longest I've gone in three months without seeing the ocean. And it was weird. The United States is quite a wide country. It's going to be an adjustment.

But there are good things too, about coming home. I miss my family and everyone at Trinity quite a lot whenever I actually stop to think about it. And since our return is drawing closer, I've been thinking about it more often lately. And I'm glad that I'm going to be in the country for Ashley and Eric's wedding in January, and that I'll be home for Christmas, even if Kate won't be there this year. And it's not as thought this is the only time I'll actually be in New Zealand. I will absolutely be back. But enough of that talk, I still have two more weeks in this amazing place! It is pretty much summer now, the snow is gone from the mountains, and the sea sparkles in the sunlight pretty much every day. It is the season for slacklining in the back yard, eating breakfast on the back deck, camping on the beach, and Christmas music! Wrap your head around that one. We still can't.

Indigo.

You may now call me Jennie: finder of kiwis, grower of moss, climber of mountains, playmate of dolphins.

Many things have happened since last I frequented this place, and for that, I apologize. My life here has been full and rich and good and busy and amazing.

Let’s backtrack for a moment: Spring Break. It was in fact a spring break, after all. It’s spring here, and it’s even finally started to act like it. I wore shorts the other day. In November. It was weird. Anyway, spring break took a lot of people a lot of places, but it took me on an epic and partially solo journey across various southern latitudes. Also odd: going south means getting colder. It still is hard to grasp sometimes. The plan was to head down to Christchurch on Saturday afternoon with Kristen and Halle, spend the night there, and then leave them to catch a bus to Invercargill on Sunday, getting there in time to watch the rugby world cup final that night. From there I would ferry to Stewart Island, and my one true goal of the week, namely, the Stewart Island Brown Kiwi. Later I was to join up with Gabe, Chimene, Jonny, Moe, and Darin in Queenstown, tourist ourselves around for a little while, and then head back to Christchurch and home. I initially was a little disappointed that I couldn’t convince anyone to come with me to Stewart Island, but I was determined to go and determined to see kiwis in the wild, so I shouldered my pack and stepped onto a bus, preparing myself for what I thought was going to be a solitary few days. How very wrong I was. In Christchurch I met Steven, Holly, and Steve. In Invercargill I met Daniel, Jason, and George. On the ferry I met Fiona and Kent. In Oban I met Camilla. In Golden Bay I met Thilo. And on the way from Invercargill to Queenstown I met Jim. And that’s not including the two hunters I met at Mason Bay who told me their names so quickly and in such thick accents and in such high winds that the best I can guess at one of them is Liam.

Moving on, Stewart Island was well worth all the trouble I went through to get there. Everyone always says that New Zealand is as close as you can get to an alien world without actually leaving the planet, and it’s not too difficult to see that when you walk into any given forest on the two main islands. But sometimes they look a little normal; there are species that have been introduced that you could find back in the States or in Europe, and if you’re not paying attention, you can forget in what an amazing place you are. Stewart Island isn’t like that. It is a much smaller island off the southern coast of the South Island, so pretty far down there, and it’s been largely left untouched. Actually, 85% of the island is one huge national park (Rakiura) and with good reason. If you want to see kiwis in the wild, Stewart Island is where you go. They have more kiwis than people there, as there is only one real settlement, a tiny little town called Oban. So that’s where I went. When one is tramping across Stewart Island, it is impossible to forget where you are. It doesn’t look anything like any forest I’ve ever seen. Sloping mountains covered by dense native bush. Manuka groves that creak in the wind. Mist descending into valleys and making its way down to the ocean. It was so amazingly different. Other. Weird. Beautiful. But weirder still is what lives there. I was sort of incidentally tramping with Thilo, a German man who’s been living in Aukland for the past few years and who also wanted to see the kiwis (he called them kivis!) so after we arrived at the hut in Mason Bay, we took our headlamps and headed out around sunset to see if we could spot one. The weather was not ideal. There had been winds of 180km an hour earlier, and it was still pretty intense when we went out. It made it hard to hear subtle sounds, but this was one of our only shots, so we went on. We finally got to this old abandoned airstrip near an historic homestead a few km out and stopped; something had rustled the tussocks of grass off to my right. I pointed into the bushes where I thought it had come from and Thilo nodded. This was it. Suddenly, from out of the grasses on my left popped one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. Apteryx australis lawryi. The Stewart Island Brown Kiwi. She stretched up to her full height (including beak I’d say half a metre), looked around, darted off a short way, and proceeded to forage for bugs in the ground as if we weren’t there. They have terrible eyesight, maybe she legitimately didn’t see us. Either way, she didn’t mind us being there, so we gave her a respectful few distance and followed. It was completely indescribable, but I will try anyway. It was amazing and beautiful and adorable and crazy and alien and fuzzy and beyond odd.  The thing that struck me most, the thing I hadn’t been expecting, was the way she moved. If she was taking a few steps, she would move sort of the way you would expect an emu or cassowary to walk, but there was no head bobbing at all. But then, if she needed to go farther, or wanted to go faster, the kiwi would run – I can think of no other way to describe it – like a dinosaur. She had this peculiar loping stride that shifted her weight back and forth with each step, making her look like nothing so much as a tiny, cute, feathered velociraptor. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. And I was so thankful to be there to see it.

On a much less epic note, one of the things that takes up my time here at the Old Convent is the garden that I have taken under my care. I’ve wanted a moss garden for quite a while, and this is finally my chance to have one. There is a sheltered place amid some fern trees and native shade grasses that I have selected as my location, and so the process of taking out unwanted plants, figuring out weed control, and placing river rocks has begun. The whole thing has sort of been an experiment in whether or not I can figure out what I’m doing, but this is a nice safe place in which to do those sorts of things, and so far so good. I’m hoping to get the rest of the rocks in by the end of this week so that I can plant over the weekend. But why moss, you ask? I’m honestly not sure. I just love the stuff. I love it when it grows in deep green carpets a few inches thick on a forest floor, when it covers every available surface at the base of a waterfall, and when it sits on fallen logs in sunlit clearings. Moss is an unassuming plant, it doesn’t flower, it can’t even reproduce without a flow of water, and I think these things make me love it more. It’s an underdog, and a survivor. It waits quietly in the background in most places until you stumble into a temperate rainforest or something and suddenly it commands your attention by hanging in huge beautiful tapestries from the limbs of towering trees.

Ok, lets take a break for a second. Still with me? Feel free to get up and get a snack or a drink or something. I realize this is getting out of hand. But wait! There’s more.

In other news, my friend Kaitlyn and I climbed a mountain last weekend. Mt Fyffe presides endlessly over the Old Convent and this semester we have watched it though every kind of weather. We have seen it sparkling under new snow, crowned with dark clouds, glowing under full moons, and standing tall as mist wraps around its base. It has been an ever present part of my view of the convent, but it was not until last weekend that Kaitlyn and I set out to conquer it. Others from our group have made the trek, but this was the first weekend that both of us had free of rugby, spring break, and other plans. And I’m so glad it was. We were hiking in the most amazing tramping weather the world has ever seen. It was perfect. It was sunny and bright, but not too hot, and the only clouds were little high cirrus ones. We got up to the hut right around tea time, where we claimed bunks and listened to other trampers chatting in French to each other. Then, the next morning, we woke two hours before dawn and hiked the rest of the way to the summit to watch the sunrise. So worth it. We were tramping above the treeline, far away from any lights, underneath a perfectly clear sky of stars. The Kaikoura peninsula was lit up in outline, and it twinkled in the wind. And the sunrise itself was phenomenal. I love watching for the glow of especially bright vermillion that lets you know where on the horizon the sun will come. Then the slightest sliver of it appears, and you have to look away almost immediately, it’s so bright. In minutes it’s already up and climbing, and turning the snow on the mountains pink and orange. We live two and a half hours north of Christchurch by car, but we could see it from the top of Mt. Fyffe, it was so clear. And slightly west of that, we could see the snow-capped peaks of the Southern Alps stretching down the country. It was incredible.

And as if that wasn’t enough, that was only the beginning of the week. Tuesday was another mind-blowing experience. We went swimming with Dusky Dolphins, some of the most social and acrobatic dolphins in existence. I was a little nervous going in, honestly. I didn’t have much experience diving in the ocean in goodness know how deep of water and with decidedly huge shapes swimming around me. I’ve never really been fond of the idea of most things in the water with me, and even aquaria can seem a bit like haunted houses at times. So it was with a twinge of trepidation that I found myself sitting on the back of a boat in a full wetsuit, hanging my flippered feet off the edge and adjusting my mask, waiting for the ok from the captain to plunge. There were dolphins surfacing less than twenty feet from us, but as I slid into the water, I realized that they were so much closer. They were twenty feet away, yes, but they were also ten, and three, and fifty, and beneath me, and all around me. And it was incredible. To hold the dolphins’ attention, we were told we could dive down, swim in circles, or make sounds to them. I tried all three for good measure, but I didn’t really need any of them. We were engulfed in the midst of a pod of 300 individuals. It was fun to try them though, so I sang them the national anthem of New Zealand in Maori, locked eyes with them, and swam in circles with them. And that was the amazing part: I swam in circles with them. We would circle each other for a few seconds and then I’d switch partners or directions, both of which seemed to amuse them to no end. And they were so much better at it than I was. I found myself hoping they have the chance to see humans out of water at some point, so that they know that we aren’t all just slightly awkward collections of clumsy angles swathed in black material. It was odd to feel embarrassed in front of them, but that’s sort of what it was. I was the awkward kid on the playground who tries hard but isn’t really any good at the games. And that was one of the things that was so wonderful about it. I love feeling put in my place by things in the natural world. I think that’s why people love to climb to the tops of mountains; everyone secretly likes to be completely dumbfounded by God’s amazing creation. 

And that is all for now. I'm headed off to the west coast this morning to go tramping around some temperate rainforests, and I won't be back until Thanksgivingish. Talk to you lovely people then!